In the field of communications, the need for high-speed transmission of data, including video and audio, has continued to increase. Moreover, there has been an increase in the selection of services by which users can connect to a network, such as the Internet. Specifically, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) may allow for connectivity to the Internet through lower-speed connections at different rates, such as 56 kilobits/second, by employing a Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) line. Other choices for connection, which are at higher speeds, into a network can include Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN), Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) service (both using a POTS line), and cable modem service over a Radio Frequency (RF) cable line. Further, other types of content providers may enable a subscriber to receive different types of media, such as a video stream, audio stream, etc.
Typical approaches to network connectivity for certain connection services (including cable modem service) are such that a group of subscribers are pooled together and treated as an individual entity (non-channelized media). Such an approach does not allow for individualized accounting and/or usage tracking for different subscribers connecting to the network.
In contrast, other approaches to network connectivity for certain connection services do allow for individualized treatment of subscribers (channelized media). Disadvantageously, these techniques require specialized software and/or hardware to be executing on the individual subscriber/client machines to allow for this individualized approach. In particular, DSL service can provide for this individualized treatment by using software and/or hardware that allows for the Point-to-Point Protocol over X protocol (e.g., where X can be a variety of different protocols, including Ethernet (PPPoE) and ATM (PPPoA)). Accordingly, the costs of such services are increased to account for this additional software and/or hardware. Advantageously, using PPP allows for the use of structured PPP usernames to aid the network access provider in a wholesale scenario. In such a scenario, the network access provider's network element needs to know the requested destination of a subscriber. To provide this information, a subscriber can create a structured PPP username by merging their username with a domain name. The provision of this structured PPP username to the network access provider's network element with PPP allows the network element to determine the requested destination. In other words, the subscriber performs the selection through the structured PPP user name.
In addition, typical approaches for network connectivity to a given service or content provider statically couples a customer premise equipment (CPE), such as a modem or personal computer, to the service requested (be it a type of service and/or content).